If you are a movie buff you must own tons of movies, old and new. I own a lot of movies myself, some of them are on my computer and others are in my cupboard. While I love bragging about my huge collection of classics and blockbusters, one of the most tedious things I come across is the act of organizing. Call me lazy but organizing movies, especially if they’re stored on your computer, seems like a herculean task for me. Lots of people crave that iTunes-esque automatic sorting of movies wherein you have all the information about the movies you own. Too bad, we’re all FOSS fanboys here and as always we are not short of workarounds.

Personally, I love to have all my metadata intact be it music or photos. That’s why I prefer using the collection managers that come with media players like Amarok for fetching metadata. For movies, though, you don’t have many collection managers to boast of. On Linux, the choices are quite limited. There are barely any good movie collection managers on our favorite platform; however, some of them are quite good. Here’s a list of the best ones in the genre:

Tellico

Tellico is a KDE-based collection manager for Linux. Not only does Tellico manage your movies, it also lets you organize your books, comic books, bibliographies, videos, coins, stamps, trading cards, wines, and more. Furthermore, you can create a custom collection of pretty much anything. Yes, anything includes Pokémons too.

Tellico stores the data in XML format. It can import data stored in CSV, RIS, BibTeX, and BibTeXML files and export data as CSV, HTML, BibTeX, BibTeXML, and PilotDB. Moreover, it can also fetch data online from Amazon, IMDB, CDDB, and other services. The simplicity and the versatility of the app make it a useful tool especially if you are running your own little library. The software is open source and can be freely downloaded from the project’s website.

Griffith is a GTK-based media collection manager for Linux. This open-source application, once installed, lets you fetch film information from various online services like Allocine, IMDB, 7arte and more. You can also import data from CSV files. The stored data can then be integrated with a database and can be exported to CSV, PDF, XML or HTML files.

One of the best features of Griffith is that it lets you keep track of movies you’ve given out on loan. You can also sort or filter your library based on your preferences.

GCstar is an open-source application for managing collection. The free software fetches each item from the Internet and lets you catalog your collections. Be it movies, games, comic books or pretty much anything, GCstar lets you store, organize, and search your collection easily.

The application is a replacement for GCfilms, a pure movie collection manager that is no longer being developed. GCstar replaced the app letting users manage pretty much everything including movies.

vMovieDB is an open-source movie collection manager for Linux. It can manage various information about a particular movie such as title, year, media type, quality, subtitles, location, genre and movie image. You can see the movie rating, the movie tags, the movie comments, and more using this app. Finding information about a movie is even easier, thanks to the built-in IMDB search support. Once you are done choosing the movie, you can open it right from the application by selecting your favorite movie player.

XBMC can also be used as a movie library manager. It intelligently fetches data about your local movies from the Internet and makes your favorite flicks easy to find. Not only does it bring all your movies together at one place, it also helps you sort them using genres, actors and more. Apart from being a good movie manager, XBMC serves as a perfect media center. It can play music, look up the weather, show a slideshow of photos, and much more. It is really worth a try even if you don’t find it that great a movie manager.